Microsoft Ships Robotics SDK

Microsoft announced it is shipping the released version 1 of its Microsoft Robotics Studio development environment for creating robotic software for a wide variety of hardware platforms.

In addition, the company introduced a third-party partner program featuring Robotics Studio-enabled applications, services and robots from independent software vendors, service providers, hardware component vendors and robot manufacturers. The company said that more than 30 third-party firms have promised to support the robotics development and runtime platform.

Robotics Studio was initially released as a community technology preview (CTP) at the RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition 2006 in Pittsburgh last June.

According to statements posted online by Microsoft, Robotics Studio is an end-to-end, scalable and extensible robotics development platform. It includes a visual programming language that enables nonprogrammers to program robots using a drag-and-drop environment, a 3-D tool that simulates robotics applications in physics-based virtual environments, using the PhysX engine which Microsoft licensed from AGEIA Technologies, and a lightweight, services-oriented runtime that enables applications to communicate with a wide variety of hardware.

Developers can create robotics applications using a variety of programming languages, including those in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Express languages, including Visual C# and Visual Basic, as well as Microsoft IronPython. Third-party languages that support the Microsoft Robotics Studio services-based architecture are also supported, the company said.